Conventionally, for example, in heart diagnosis, morphological information about the cardiac muscle and coronary artery, and functional information about the motion and ischemic condition are acquired using various modalities. The morphological information and the functional information are imaged and displayed. The imaged morphological information and functional information are used for heart diagnosis.
The morphological information and the functional information cannot be acquired by one imaging or one modality for an object. For a comprehensive diagnosis for the object and examination of a treatment plan, two images respectively corresponding to the morphological information and the functional information need to be associated with each other. This association is executed by collating morphological information and functional information that can be read from respective images.
More specifically, in the heart diagnosis, for example, a registration between a plurality of images is important to display a plurality of images respectively corresponding to morphological information and functional information at the same position on the same slice. The registration between a plurality of images is automatically executed by, for example, using the degree of correlation with teacher data (to be referred to as automatic registration processing hereinafter).
When the automatic registration processing fails or when the registration accuracy is low, an input operation for a registration by an operator is necessary. At this time, information about adjustment of a registration and the result of a registration need to be displayed to the operator.
However, in adjustment of a registration by the input operation of the operator, it is difficult to display information about adjustment of a registration, the result of a registration, and the like to the operator. In addition, the operability of adjustment of a registration is poor for the operator. These problems increase the burden of the input operation by the operator, and adjustment of a registration cannot be easily executed by the input operation of the operator. In addition, in the heart diagnosis, an entire region concerning the heart of an object may not fall within the scan region of an ultrasonic image. At this time, automatic registration processing may not be executed.